Tales of a Possessed Marshmallow Man

David McMahon asked us this week to tell a Toy Story, well David, here ya go!

The year was 1985 (I think) and there was only one toy I wanted that year – the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. My family was a huge fan of The Ghostbusters and I even had the movie picture book. I read through that book so many times, looking at all the pictures. I think the bitterness was setting in on the family. My parents had already divorced, but we hadn’t yet moved to New York. I remember one picture, of Gozer covered in bubbles with the two demon dogs at her side. My mother said my father bought be the book because of that picture, that he probably stared at it all the time or some other such nonsense. I didn’t care. I always pictured Dan Ackroyd as the perfect dad and wanted that stuffed Stay Puft to snuggle with at night like the kid on the commercial.

And I got it! The real one too, not a knock-off. When I had wanted a Strawberry Shortcake doll my mom’s friend made me one, not the same to a kid looking for the tags. Cabbage Patch Kid? Also made from a kit with a printed out adoption certificate, doesn’t cut it. But this one was the Kenner original.

He was bigger than I expected, and had that sailors cap with a real blue ribbon. He was very soft and cuddly. And he had a huge smile one. There was one thing I didn’t know about the doll – its face glowed in the dark. That, I didn’t learn until that night.

My parents were happy that they had been able to please me, to give me a gift I really wanted. So my mother was none to happy to hear I had thrown the doll across the room screaming during the night. I woke up – and that grin was just there floating in the darkness of my room.

I had a friend that had wanted a giggling cookie monster of some sort. She broke it the first night because she rolled on it, it screeched into the silence, “ME WANT COOKIE!” and she thought for sure it was trying to eat her. Survival of the fittest, her or the doll, and she won while I laughed at the story. I thought for sure I’d never be such a wimp!

Now, here I was with a doll that wouldn’t die but just grin evilly all through the night.

I think I tried, my mother was upset. I had wanted that doll so badly and now it was scaring me. In the end, my brother got it. He had wanted it too, secretly envying my doll while outwardly making fun of the stuffed toy. We all loved Ghostbusters.

Image from Answers.com

Do You Beleive In Ghosts?

David McMahon of Authorblog asks this question of his readers this week. It’s an interesting one indeed, because what is a ghost? Is it the spirit of a dead person come to haunt us? A lost soul stuck between realms? Maybe the question is broader in scope though, just asking if I think there are other things out there, things that perhaps we can’t see and that aren’t a divinity.

To that, I say yes.

When I was younger the Major of our Salvation Army corps helped my mother out by baby-sitting my brother and I on occasion. He had a trampoline that I loved and would jump on it the entire time I was there. My mother commented on how I could just jump on that thing for hours.

In what is probably not the norm for Salvation Army officers, this man claimed to have the gift of exorcism. He could also speak in tongues and translate when others did so. In fact, he regaled his congregation with stories of going to revivals where people were supposedly speaking in tongues. Then, he would speak in a foreign language and laugh as others mistranslated what he was saying.

We learned that if Satan or his demons come after you to say, “In the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ I order you to leave.” I woke up from more than one dream saying these words.

“Exorcism,” he explained to his congregation, “is not like you see in movies. It is not something ‘spectacular’ that takes place in hours. It is a long process. The person must want the demon gone, they must learn of God’s love, of his power.” It was more like therapy sessions that he did with these people.

We also learned that when a hypnotist puts a person under, they are making them susceptible to possession by another entity. In terms of past lives, it is the demon that has entered the body and speaking of their life they’ve led, not the person who is hypnotized. There is but one life for us on Earth, and then the other either in heaven or hell.

Now, our church had a big gymnasium and play room. I remember one potluck dinner when my brother and I were running around with all the other kids, then called in to hear the prayer before eating. As the Major prayed, one of the lights, the long bolted into the ceiling florescent gymnasium lights, pulled from the ceiling and swung toward him, then dropped to the floor a few inches in front of him. We all stood our mouths agape. It had literally swung across the room.

There were other things too, similar to what Shrink posted about in her response. Times when items just started flinging off shelves and my brother and I stood in the corner repeating, “In the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I command you to leave” in our frightened young voices.

Maybe it’s not belief, maybe it’s knowledge that there is more out there. Angels, demons, poltergeists, ghosts, whatever you want to call it. They are there.

Dreams of Angels and Demons

Carlos Schwabe's "Death and the Gravedigger"

I think I have mentioned a couple dreams here. It’s funny how they’ve always been my indicator that something is wrong.

There was one recurring dream I had when I was younger, while I may not have many concrete images of the life lived, I do remember the one dreamed.

I think I was five the first time I had the dream, in the dream I am around age five. Then it came back a couple more times by age seven, and then again when I was a pre-teen, enough times for me to remember.

I was asleep in bed when I get woken by a storm outside. I go to my parent’s room because I’m afraid and my mother is sound asleep. I peer through the door and see my father. He is sitting on the side of the bed and there is a glass of water and a bottle of red pills. He swallows one and suddenly horns sprout out of his head, a tail grows. He turns to me as his skin is becoming ruddy and his eyes glow. He sees me and begins to chase me. I scream and run from the doorway.

My mother, hearing my cries, wakes up. She opens up the drawer and takes out a jar of white pills. She swallows one and her hair turns white and grows out long, a white gown forms around her, she runs out to help.

I am outside running in the rain and it’s very damp. I’m slipping on the grass as my father chases me throwing out curses, flames shooting from his mouth. My mother begins to chase him, yelling for him to leave us alone. I run toward a pine tree and am running around it slipping and sliding with my father/demon behind me and my mother/angel behind him. Then I slip and fall and he towers over me – and I wake up sweating.

Like I said – the first time was at age five. The dynamics were already there. Although I don’t remember much about my father – I know from this dream he wasn’t someone I felt safe around. There were times when I loved nothing more than using his arm as a pillow (in fact, one of my scarier “I can’t believe I dreamed it” dreams involved me cutting of his arm to use as my pillow, the rest of him living at another house. It was bloody, but comfortable).

I was five. Five years old and my father is a demon my mother an angel. I have a scar under my lip. My mother always said it was from when I was age five and she and my father were in their bedroom. My brother and I were peering through the door, when my brother pushed me. My father came barreling out of the room and hit me – sending my tooth through my lip. This is my mother’s story of the scar; I have no memory of the real event. But parts of it make sense for the timing of the dream which I do remember.

Dreams have always been more real to me than my past, maybe that’s why I remember some of dreams so much more clearly than I do other events in my life. They are the way my mind worked through so many happenings, told me in ways I could understand what was going on in my life.

I wanted my mother to be my angel, but even in the dream, no matter how many times I dreamt it she never saved me. It’s also kind of interesting to me, looking back, that she had to take a pill to help me. This kind of goes with the running bi-polar theory. When she was medicated, she was normal. When she was on her pills, whatever they were (she never really told us) she was ‘our mother.’



When talking with my therapist about this we discussed the main points - how I saw my mother and father- which is quite obvious by the whole demon/angel imagery. However, the most interesting to her was that my mother never saved me. In all of my dreams, in all of my stories, no one saves me. I want her to, but in the end I save myself, be it by waking myself up or through getting on with my life and just standing up against all odds. There was no white knight for me, not even an angel.